Friday PhotoEssay – October 31

We made it to the “end” of the growing season! A few of the cold tolerant plants will keep going for a few more weeks, but everything else was removed this week. Take a look:

This is from Tuesday morning, before we started working. We got the cold frame out last week for a tour, although we haven’t needed to close it yet. Maybe tonight before we leave.

And this if from this morning. We did leave some of the herbs in, because we just couldn’t take them out when they were still looking good. I suspect that they will have to come out after this weekend.

We ended up with quite the pile in the “ready to compost” bin. Some of it may end up being to fibrous to easily compost, but it needed a chance!

The radishes were ready to harvest, so we pulled most of them. This is what happens when you plant all the radishes at once rather than staggering them. You get a LOT of radishes all at once.

We found these cool, lavender mushrooms growing under the cowpeas. No, we didn’t eat them, since we weren’t sure what they were.

A couple of the kohlrabi were ready to harvest, so we gave them a taste test. If you’ve never had kohlrabi, they taste a lot like a turnip, but a little sweeter and more mild.

The mystery of the browning leaves on the horseradish was solved…by actually looking more closely at the plants. They have a bunch of harlequin bugs making a home on them. These bugs are most commonly found on kale, so I was a little surprised they were on the horseradish. Given the upcoming cold weather, we decided not to worry about them for now. Especially since it’s highly unlikely they will come close to killing the horseradish.

The spinach is looking great, and I expect it will continue looking good for weeks to come. Fall spinach is the best, especially as the weather gets colder and the leaves get sweeter!